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Nairn's London
TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR and OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014
'This book is a record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham. My hope is that it moves you, too.'
Nairn's London is an idiosyncratic, poetic and intensely subjective meditation on a city and its buildings. Including railway stations, synagogues, abandoned gasworks, dock cranes, suburban gardens, East End markets, Hawksmoor churches, a Gothic cinema and twenty-seven different pubs, it is a portrait of the soul of a place, from a writer of genius.
240 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1967
About the author
Ian Nairn
25 books6 followersIan Douglas Nairn was a British architectural critic and topographer.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 7, 2014
Ian Nairn, who died from alcoholism in 1983 at the age of 52, was a true English amateur genius eccentric.
Together with Outrage, his 1955 jeremiad on modern planning and architecture, Nairn's idiosyncratic and poetic 1966 tour through London's built landscape exemplifies just how vital his writing and understanding could be.
His premise was simple, and refreshingly selfish: to produce "a record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham" and, in this, Nairn succeeded like no-one else.
But his vision of Swinging London - to the vast majority of its inhabitants it was nothing of the sort - now republished by Penguin Classics, is so extraordinary, whimsical, opinionated and ultimately tragic as to make it an essential part of the canon for anyone interested in the capital, architecture, history or British society.
Nairn's prose is strange and beguiling: who else would describe a church as "an orgasm" or the elephant on the Albert Memorial like the backside of a businessman scrabbling under a table for his chequebook?
And his personal choices - by no means all favourable - include Westminster Abbey, a host of public houses, parts of bombed-out East London and the extraordinary Swiss chalet transported to, and plonked down in the leafy riverside idyll of Hampton.
It is Nairn's flights of fancy which make this book an essential and enduring read.
His description of the City church, St Mary Woolnoth, reads: "Space here is so tangible that you can experience, for the price of a bus ticket to the City, the super reality of the mystics or mescalin." Quite.
Nairn's London no longer exists. True, many of the buildings still stand but the zeitgeist and culture has changed beyond all recognition. We no longer live in a London-centric country. That is as it should be.
But this does not mean that Nairn's fascinating and lyrical masterpiece no longer speaks to us.
In many ways, its message - that buildings and the built landscape should always have character and work for real people, rather than aim for the purity of platonic abstraction - has never been more relevant.
Together with Outrage, his 1955 jeremiad on modern planning and architecture, Nairn's idiosyncratic and poetic 1966 tour through London's built landscape exemplifies just how vital his writing and understanding could be.
His premise was simple, and refreshingly selfish: to produce "a record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham" and, in this, Nairn succeeded like no-one else.
But his vision of Swinging London - to the vast majority of its inhabitants it was nothing of the sort - now republished by Penguin Classics, is so extraordinary, whimsical, opinionated and ultimately tragic as to make it an essential part of the canon for anyone interested in the capital, architecture, history or British society.
Nairn's prose is strange and beguiling: who else would describe a church as "an orgasm" or the elephant on the Albert Memorial like the backside of a businessman scrabbling under a table for his chequebook?
And his personal choices - by no means all favourable - include Westminster Abbey, a host of public houses, parts of bombed-out East London and the extraordinary Swiss chalet transported to, and plonked down in the leafy riverside idyll of Hampton.
It is Nairn's flights of fancy which make this book an essential and enduring read.
His description of the City church, St Mary Woolnoth, reads: "Space here is so tangible that you can experience, for the price of a bus ticket to the City, the super reality of the mystics or mescalin." Quite.
Nairn's London no longer exists. True, many of the buildings still stand but the zeitgeist and culture has changed beyond all recognition. We no longer live in a London-centric country. That is as it should be.
But this does not mean that Nairn's fascinating and lyrical masterpiece no longer speaks to us.
In many ways, its message - that buildings and the built landscape should always have character and work for real people, rather than aim for the purity of platonic abstraction - has never been more relevant.
March 4, 2015
"What I'm after is character, or personality, or essence." skriver Nairn själv i förordet. Visst borde man välja människorna i sitt liv utifrån de tre kriterierna? Vanliga Nairnord om Londons byggnader, kvarter eller parker är "eccentric", "idiosyncratic" och "avant-garde". Speglar utan tvivel honom själv.
Tragiskt nog skriver någon annnan i efterordet "The rest was beer, as he surrendered to his demons and slowly destroyed himself in the St George's Tavern near his flat in Pimlico. Nairn önskade bli begraven under flight path:en till Heathrow och så blev det. Under densamma skriver undertecknad dessa rader.
"Jag bryr mig inte om författaren, bara verket" brukar jag ofta säga. Detta är dessutom en slags daterad reseguide, men Nairns biografi fascinerar. "Gloriously opinionated" fick han chans att skriva om arkitektur på 50-talet, "after two false starts in mathematics and the RAF." Falsk start, tänk om hela mitt liv är en falsk start. En av två. Eller tre?
"The wrecked grandeur of Spitalfields"
"Hampstead - a bit of a joke"
"an Edgar Allan Poe of a building" (Eastcheap)
"it looks like a normal St John's Woods villa pickled in embalming fluid by some mad doctor."
"One of the sweetest things in the City, a little medieval church sitting up as pert as a sparrow or a typist between two monuments to commerce."
Tragiskt nog skriver någon annnan i efterordet "The rest was beer, as he surrendered to his demons and slowly destroyed himself in the St George's Tavern near his flat in Pimlico. Nairn önskade bli begraven under flight path:en till Heathrow och så blev det. Under densamma skriver undertecknad dessa rader.
"Jag bryr mig inte om författaren, bara verket" brukar jag ofta säga. Detta är dessutom en slags daterad reseguide, men Nairns biografi fascinerar. "Gloriously opinionated" fick han chans att skriva om arkitektur på 50-talet, "after two false starts in mathematics and the RAF." Falsk start, tänk om hela mitt liv är en falsk start. En av två. Eller tre?
"The wrecked grandeur of Spitalfields"
"Hampstead - a bit of a joke"
"an Edgar Allan Poe of a building" (Eastcheap)
"it looks like a normal St John's Woods villa pickled in embalming fluid by some mad doctor."
"One of the sweetest things in the City, a little medieval church sitting up as pert as a sparrow or a typist between two monuments to commerce."
November 28, 2019
“London is indeed a thousand villages; remove them and all that is left is a vast hulk peppered with spectacular buildings, quaint occasions, false sophistication and too many people in the Underground.”
As this is a reprint of the original 1966 edition this is as much as a period piece as a travel guide, and yet strangely enough some of the advice still holds strong today. Nairn’s style was totally against the grain of his time, assured, irreverent and devoid of pretentiousness and we even get a postscript on London beer. More than half a century later he still manages to raise the odd laugh too.
With this being London the depth and breadth of the history and architecture is fairly incredible. Nairn is clearly a huge fan of Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, John Nash and Aston Webb, who all made wonderful contributions to the enduring architectural landscape. If Nairn was still alive today god only knows what he would make of the ghostly vacant iceberg mansions and the many towering eyesores scarring the skies of London?...The avaricious politicians and property speculators which have spawned the likes of the Walkie Talkie, the Gherkin and the Shard?...
There are a lot of pictures in here, all in black and white and in terms of the standard they are exactly what you would expect from a guide book from more than half a century ago – poor. Or if you prefer the euphemism- “of the time”. The quality resembled the gritty images you would come across in some of the historical and architectural accounts of Soviet Russia, but again I suppose this feeds deeply into the idea of authentic period piece.
Nairn has been a huge influence on the likes of Ian Sinclair, Owen Hatherley and to a lesser extent Rowan Moore and like them he shows the city of London in a very unique and refreshing way that allows us a deeper and at times off-centre view on one of the most compelling cities in the world.
May 29, 2015
This is a guidebook unlike any other, and should be read for its wonderful prose and dramatic description of a time largely gone. If you're interested in London, architecture and powerful opinions then it is a must.
Ian Nairn acquired a legendary status as an angry young man of architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, and he wrote numerous articles, books and TV programmes before his early demise in the 1980s from alcholism. This book (a reprint of the 1966 original) is the pinnacle of his achievements and, as befits its author, isn't the conventional guidebook that picks out the main tourist spots or architecturally significant buildings in Greater London. Instead, and in Iain Nairn's own words it is "a record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham". As such it covers not only many significant buildings in Central London but also alleyways, pubs, viewpoints as well as buildings perhaps only really known within their own locale.
Reading the book makes you want to rush out and visit the places he mentions or at least sit with a London A-Z and the internet to hand to find out more. Sadly, much has changed since this book was written and many of the places he describes have since disappeared or at least changed utterly. What Ian Nairn would make of these places now is easy to imagine given the strong opinions he expresses throughout his writing on what he found on his initial visit. Whilst it contains accurate and clear architectural and historical background to the places included, it is these opinions that moves it in to a league of its own.
Ian Nairn acquired a legendary status as an angry young man of architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, and he wrote numerous articles, books and TV programmes before his early demise in the 1980s from alcholism. This book (a reprint of the 1966 original) is the pinnacle of his achievements and, as befits its author, isn't the conventional guidebook that picks out the main tourist spots or architecturally significant buildings in Greater London. Instead, and in Iain Nairn's own words it is "a record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham". As such it covers not only many significant buildings in Central London but also alleyways, pubs, viewpoints as well as buildings perhaps only really known within their own locale.
Reading the book makes you want to rush out and visit the places he mentions or at least sit with a London A-Z and the internet to hand to find out more. Sadly, much has changed since this book was written and many of the places he describes have since disappeared or at least changed utterly. What Ian Nairn would make of these places now is easy to imagine given the strong opinions he expresses throughout his writing on what he found on his initial visit. Whilst it contains accurate and clear architectural and historical background to the places included, it is these opinions that moves it in to a league of its own.
January 15, 2015
It makes you want to go and explore and see how much of what he describes is actually left - not much probably. And I wonder what he would have made of the London of today - again, not much. He is so passionate and so moved by buildings that I can even forgive his apparent indifference to Lutyens. You can also see that he felt things more strongly than most or had a thinner skin - always fighting for the odd, the eccentric, the real and the human, and being thwarted at every turn by a world ruled by accountants and architects more wedded to ideology than care for what people might actually want or need. If he had been born later he would probably have drunk himself to death an awful lot sooner. A sad and wonderful book.
November 25, 2014
My favourite guide to London by one of the stars of British architectural writing. He was incapable of writing a dull sentence and his commitment to good townscape is the leitmotif of the book. Much has gone and the book is an epitaph to the greed of developers ad the cupidity of authority. You could not read this without learning much about architecture and cities.
July 15, 2018
amazing book, totally subjective view of London, but one you don't want to miss
November 13, 2020
Reads like a series of poems, more impassioned and moving than much of that being written today
November 1, 2014
While I.N. is extremely opinionated he does get you to take a closer look at London, to look again at buildings you feel you've already looked pretty closely at, and plenty of times.
This book was written in the 60s and the original photographs are included in this reprint. But the problem with this book is entirely to do with pictures. Firstly, even in the original publication, there were never enough of them. There should have been at least one of each building he visits. Secondly, since London has rebuilt itself various times since, and will forever continue to do so, what is needed is a brave editor who will throw caution and Ian Nairn's contract to the wind, and fill the book with many more modern photos, for contrast. It should become a sort of Nairn's and Your London.
This book was written in the 60s and the original photographs are included in this reprint. But the problem with this book is entirely to do with pictures. Firstly, even in the original publication, there were never enough of them. There should have been at least one of each building he visits. Secondly, since London has rebuilt itself various times since, and will forever continue to do so, what is needed is a brave editor who will throw caution and Ian Nairn's contract to the wind, and fill the book with many more modern photos, for contrast. It should become a sort of Nairn's and Your London.
October 11, 2012
Sadly, the edition of this book, which I used to possess has gone missing.
Ian Nairn, a writer with architectural training, complied this guide of the most fascinating and unusual sights in London. As a teenager, I used to seek them out with my friends. Unfortunately, most of the things that Nairn recommended no longer exist.
He also wrote a superb and quirky guide to Paris (not listed on Goodreads), which, by now, must have been out of print for many years. If you can find it second-hand, snap it up!
Ian Nairn, a writer with architectural training, complied this guide of the most fascinating and unusual sights in London. As a teenager, I used to seek them out with my friends. Unfortunately, most of the things that Nairn recommended no longer exist.
He also wrote a superb and quirky guide to Paris (not listed on Goodreads), which, by now, must have been out of print for many years. If you can find it second-hand, snap it up!
June 7, 2008
Do not buy this edition of this book - it doesnt have Nairn's excellent photgraphs. Buy the first edition with the red bus on. One of the best writers on London and architecture in the 1950s and 1960s, and a fun guide to places that may or may not still be there now.
March 17, 2013
I can't begin to sum my feelings about this book - a book in itself; in fact, read my own London gibberish - it's sprinkled with like musings although written before I'd read a word of Nairn or even seen the TV progs - at the risk of sounding arrogant and conceited, a kindred spirit
Want to Read
July 22, 2011Recommended by Francis Pugh.
February 3, 2015
An interesting book, I would love someone to revisit all the sites now and see if they are there
February 16, 2015
This is a reprint of the 1968 edition, which is the one I read in preparation to a trip to London in 1971.
June 27, 2026
I love love letters to/of cities.
Also that intro written in 1966 might as well be written now in 2026.
Also that intro written in 1966 might as well be written now in 2026.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews